Frog or chicken
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From Charles Belov:
While scouting out restaurants on Yelp, I noticed that Harborview Restaurant Yelp page had an item on the menu listed in English as Congee with Bone-in Chicken. However, the menu image, taken in 2022, reads "Congree with stir-fried frog" in Chinese.
This appears to have been corrected on the Harborview Restaurant website. The Dim Sum menu reads Congee with Bone-in Chicken in English and 黃毛鷄粥 (jook with the Chinese version of free-range chicken) in Chinese.
I wonder how the frog got in there. Of course, I've eaten frog at Cantonese restaurants but it doesn't seem to be on Harborview's menu.
Screen print from Yelp:
Simple solution:
Frogs are called “chicken of the field” due to the similarity in taste, per Compendium of Materia Medica first attested in the 1578 CE:
-
- The Southerners had them as food, found their meat to be similar to chicken, and therefore called them “field chicken”.
Compare Vietnamese gà đồng (literally “field chicken”).
Long before I knew anything about Chinese, my brothers and I would go out to creeks and ponds near our home and catch frogs to cook various ways, and we invariably would say, "This tastes like chicken".
Selected readings
- "Frog Crisis in Greece" (5/26/10)
- "Chinesey Japanese in a Hong Kong restaurant" (10/2/21)
- "Congee: the Dravidian roots of the name for a Chinese dish" (11/13/17)
GF said,
November 19, 2023 @ 1:48 am
I believe it's actually Sha Tin chicken congee, where Sha Tin is a city in Hong Kong.
Chas Belov said,
November 19, 2023 @ 3:40 am
@GF: Ah, you're right, I had the wrong radical. Water, not fire. Shatin Chicken Congee it is. So I wonder why the Chinese name changed. Maybe they didn't used to use yellow-haired chicken and now they do.
Chas Belov said,
November 19, 2023 @ 3:51 am
I suspect I jumped to the conclusion because I've trained myself to see 田雞 as frog – look for it ,even, since I like it – and forgot that the parsing could leave 田 as a second word. (And, while I've been to 沙田, it was many years ago and I only knew a few Chinese characters at the time.)
I imagine they would be amused if I had ordered from that earlier menu and asked for "chaau tihngāai jook" instead of "sàatihn gāai jook".
Chas Belov said,
November 19, 2023 @ 3:51 am
*could leave 田 as a second syllable of a word.
Chas Belov said,
November 19, 2023 @ 4:09 am
Actually, odd (to this barely-literate-in-about-100-to-300-characters Chinese reader) that the two characters 沙 sand and 炒 stir-fry are pronounced so differently despite appearing to have the same phonetic. If they actually were pronounced the same, I would be able to get away with the mistake, at the cost of not ordering what I thought I was ordering (not that I would mind getting chicken rather than frog).
Chas Belov said,
November 19, 2023 @ 4:14 am
While we're at it, I notice the menu includes:
Baked Pineapple Buns
菠蘿奶黄包
with Custard and Real Pineapple
$9
which I find odd since normally pineapple buns don't have any pineapple.
For the record, here is the jook dish:
Congee with Bone-in Chicken
黃毛鷄粥
$20
Ryan said,
November 19, 2023 @ 10:12 am
I’m curious why “field.” I might have thought swamp, pond or even puddle chicken. I think of fields, even in the sense of non-cultivated fields, as being too dry for frogs. What did field mean to you when you were young and hunting frogs?
Calvin said,
November 19, 2023 @ 1:21 pm
@Ryan
"Field" (田) is referring to the paddy fields for growing rice. So that is an ideal habitat for frogs.
@Chas Belov
There are actual 田雞粥 on the menu in some Chinese restaurants.
Victor Mair said,
November 20, 2023 @ 6:15 pm
From Sun Dang:
沙田雞粥 does mean the chicken congee of Shatin.
If you google image the term 沙田雞粥, tons of images will be seen. Nothing about 田雞 in this case.
It was quite common, at least up to 1990s or early 2000s, students of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (which is in Shatin) would group together to go to 大圍 (next to Shatin station) to have 雞粥 as a social event in the evening. So there is also a term 大圍雞粥. Google this term and information are boundless.
VHM:
Thanks.
But the original question was how "frog" got on the menu.
Chas Belov said,
November 20, 2023 @ 9:41 pm
That was actually the point of the whole exchange between GF and myself.
I mistakenly parsed the dish's name as (沙)(田雞)(粥) when it would correctly be parsed as (沙田)(雞)(粥) because my eyes latched on to the sequence (田雞) and then compounded the error by mistaking 沙 for 炒.
Chris Button said,
November 20, 2023 @ 10:30 pm
That’s a great mis-parsing!
Also there seems to be quite a lot of folk etymologizing going on here:
That seems to be another one of those confusing cases of graphic convergence. I suppose a graphic kind of “folk etymology” plays a role here.
I highly doubt this to be the correct etymology. More likely is that the pronunciation of 蛙 converged over time with 雞 in this compound via folk etymology.
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2023 @ 11:12 pm
In Old Chinese:
蛙 ʁajː "frog" (EMC Ɂwaɨj but confused with EMC Ɂwaɨ likely due to onomatopoeic origin)
雞 kajˑ "chicken" (EMC kɛj)
So I would argue that 田雞 is a corruption of 田蛙
Jonathan Smith said,
November 24, 2023 @ 9:35 pm
Folk etymological reanalysis of 'field'+'frog' as 'field'+'chicken' is perhaps possible… e.g. Hokkien has ke~kue 'chicken', the relevant local 'frog' word being tsuí-k(u)e written "水雞"~"水蛙"… but it's not clear to me if the second syllable could really reflect the 'frog' etymon at issue or indeed if a cognate of Mand. wa1 蛙 even exists in the colloquial language(s)… plus this compound begins 'water', not 'field', making 'chicken' entirely plausible in the original coinage.
Re: the character “炒”, it seems to be late and there were probably lots of inventive ways to write the associated word(s) 'fry/toast with pan'. This particular choice seems to be a run-of-the-mill "phonosemantic compound," no reanalysis involved. And "沙” has appeared to contain "少" for a couple thousand years. 'Fry' and 'sand/gravel' aren't so different in sound in some languages… both have -a in (most of?) Coastal Min I think for instance.
Chris Button said,
November 26, 2023 @ 10:30 pm
@ Jonathan Smith
Thanks for the note about 水雞~水蛙.
Regarding 炒, its phonetic is unequivocally 少.
Regarding 沙, it is phonologically incompatible with 少 as phonetic. If we are to take Huang Dekuan’s (ed.) proposal for example, then 沙 goes back to the oracle bones. It seems most scholars have refrained from such speculation since the character in question occurs once and is unclear in meaning. However, some bronze forms show more than four dots for the 少 component in 沙, and in that way they appear close to the oracle-bone form in question. In any case, the variation in the bronze forms suggest a convergence with 少 rather than it being the phonetic component.